The Moral Laziness of the #NeverTrumpers

The hour is late, and I feel compelled to join others in making a final appeal to the NeverTrumpers who are refusing to vote for the Republican nominee and thereby increasing the probability of, if not ensuring, a Hillary Clinton victory.

My appeal is simple: Put your rigid moralism aside and do what is best not only for the country today but for our future.

PJ Media co-founder and CEO emeritus Roger L. Simon made a similar appeal in a recent article in which he wrote that, given the extent of Hillary Clinton’s corruption, “it's time for the NeverTrumpers to take a final look at their position.”

Do they want to enable such a crime syndicate to be running the U.S. government? And if so, how do they expect it ever to end, if not now? Through litigation? Under whose auspices? Do they not think, if Hillary is elected, that the paramount goal of her administration will be to further entrench the syndicate, making it impermeable to change, turning the USA into the ghost of itself? These things happen in history.

Not simple, is it?

If I were writing my book on moral narcissism today, I would have to add a chapter on the NeverTrumpers, because -- like it or not -- their stance, while once idealistic, at this point seems rather too substantially based on self-regard. They want to have "clean hands" to avoid any tarnishing by the unseemly Mr. Trump.

Simon is right. It’s not simple. As Hoerderer said in Sartre’s play, politics is a nasty business and sometimes you get “dirty hands right up to the elbows.”

The case of the dirty hands is heard in many political debates but most frequently and passionately as it applies to torture, which might be fitting since many NeverTrumpers think it would be torturous to vote for Trump. I’d like to draw from that debate to make a point Simon also makes regarding the “moral narcissism” of many NeverTrumpers—those who want to avoid any stain of Trump debauchery so they can lift their heads proudly, saving not only themselves but hopefully the GOP from the inevitable and fatal stigma of sexism, racism, and white nationalism.

Little do they realize the GOP already has these labels firmly fixed on it by the Left, and it probably always will until the Left is defeated and the labeling they have been successfully executing for decades is defied and destroyed. But that’s another post for another day. For now, I’d like to borrow from one of my favorite intellectuals regarding this moral narcissism that keeps the pure and pristine from pulling a lever for Trump: Jean Bethke Elshtain.